All posts tagged ‘dungeon-crawler’

Dungeon Crawlers all over the internet are rejoicing today, for this is finally — finally! — release day for Torchlight II.

For those of you who somehow managed to miss it (maybe you were trapped in a real dungeon for the last three years?), Torchlight is an action/role-playing video game in which the player controls a Hero who explores dungeons while slaying monsters, collecting loot, and fulfilling quests. If you’re a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy fiction, and video games, then the Torchlight games were created for you.

Refreshingly, Torchlight is not rendered as yet another first-person video game; instead, it is an isometric-perspective game like Diablo, Age of Empires, or Civilization. Using mouse and keyboard, the player navigates his character through the dungeon, using spectacular spells and weaponry to battle monsters along the way. The player is assisted by a companion animal that fights alongside the player and assists in dealing with accumulated treasure. As the game proceeds, the player’s abilities increase, as does the nastiness of the monsters.

Since its big reveal more than a year ago, Square Enix’s Heroes of Ruin has enjoyed a unique brand of buzz among handheld gamers. Loot-heavy dungeon-crawlers with solid multiplayer support aren’t exactly easy to come by on the Nintendo 3DS, so those of us who appreciate both this classic style of gameplay and the specific strengths of that portable were hard-pressed to find any other suitable alternative.

Still, even among this interested minority the reaction to the final product has been mixed. Yet amid frame-rate issues, questionable design decisions and off-putting audio glitches the title manages to offer the most addictive kind of gaming fun.

Heroes of Ruin takes place in the fantasy realm of Veil where Ataraxis, the sphinx ruler of hub world Nexus, is dying. Taking the role of any of four different hero types, players must fight to find a cure and to unravel the mystery behind his supernatural affliction. The game puts a nice slant on the classic character tropes offering speedy ranged fighter the Gunslinger, the tank-like Savage, the magic-using Alchitect and the paladin-style Vindicator. I chose the last, and was pleased to find that all the visual tweaks I made to my lion-faced character model translated directly into the game’s cut scenes.